A local firm invents a ‘self-charging’ battery. Could this be the future for Zimbabwe?
We bumped into something interesting on LinkedIn. You know Cybercard Enterprise Solutions (CyberBiz) right? If not then you should know its CEO at least. We last wrote about it in 2015 though, right about the time when ZIMURA had partnered Econet and had brought them (Cybercard) and Logical Systems on board to try and curb music piracy…well, that didn’t go so well seeing the problem still exists.
Anyway, that’s not the issue we’re on today. David Chifunyise, the CEO of Cybercard Enterprise Solutions (now you know) announced on his LinkedIn how their company had created a ‘self charging’ battery that uses the natural moisture surrounding it to produce power – talk about renewable energy!
It was not the only development he announced but definitely his most important one. Below is the announcement in his own words
I’m really excited by the recent research discoveries made by our R&D department. We have recently been studying Renewable Energy and the cheap creation of Hydrogen from water for our Internal Combustion Engines. We now have this technology working powering our generators using Hydrogen – This we feel will go a long way in creating Mini-Grids for Africa – which is our main target market.
That’s not the most exciting development though, during the Hydrogen research we created a new Compound that we found could split water in the latent moisture at room temperature and this was generating electricity in the process. We have now taken that technology further and have created a self charging battery that uses nothing but the moisture in the environment to produce power. Simply Exciting !. We have found the batteries highly efficient and you can increase Voltage by stacking units and increase Amperage by increasing the surface area. Our Power Banks shall be our first product but we will be moving into commercial power generation for companies and for communities after our first round of funding.
Our next step as we further our research is to incorporate Graphene into the batteries to dramatically increase how much power our cells can output without drastically increasing the battery size – This should allow us to create Self-Charging batteries for Electric Vehicles which is a world changer for the viability of the electric vehicle market. We look forward to a day where Zimbabwe becomes the leader in supplying EV Batteries.
It’s quite exciting to see such developments considering how ZESA has been struggling to power the nation, I’m sure you’re also witnessing the power cuts too. I know it’s probably a stretch to then think that this new technology can replace thermal power etc in the country in the short run. But if there’s anything I learnt from the whole former president-step-down, it’s that a week is a looong time and if this happened within one, then anything can happen within one.
It is even much more exciting that this development comes during a time when we are restructuring or having new governance altogether. I know the last one wasn’t too supportive of alternative forms of energy, I mean had it been we’d be somewhere with solar; even worse considering how vast the resource is within the country.
Most importantly, I hope that this technology can successfully be scaled up for commercial use after all that’s what matters right? It’s not enough to have just one or two things leveraging on this type of energy, in fact, it’s not even worth talking about when so.
For now, Techzim is reporting based on this post, we intend to go and witness the technology ourselves; sure from there we can give you better insight of the technology and the company’s plans going forward. However, on the post, David called on for those interested in investing to make contact via email: ceo@cyberbiz.org or call on +263773000880.
